De-enemizing the enemy in the contemporary truce film

Abstract

The author’s interest resides in war films which re-humanize the enemy so as to question the militaristic philosophy and politics of a given military conflict. Her discussion focuses on the truce film as a notable subgenre of the war film which, characteristically, transcends both historical and nationalistic paradigms. The analysis of Kya Dilli Kya Lahore and Camp X-Ray, as examples of two subvariants of the truce film, serve to underscore the narrative and cinematic strategies used to construct the effect of the interchangeability of the enemy protagonists, therefore ostentatiously undoing traditional state and army enforced forms of ‘distancing’ (see Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 1995). The questions to be posed include where, when and why truce films are produced, how do they correlate to the prevalent definitions of the war film genre and, finally, to what extent can they be seen as potentially constructing a ‘prosthetic memory’ (Alison Landsberg, ‘Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification’, 2009)?